Catherine Deneuve has made five films with André Téchiné, more than with any other director she has worked with in her long career: Hôtel des Amériques, Le Lieu du crime/Scene of the Crime, Ma saison préférée/My Favourite Season, Les Voleurs/Thieves and Les Temps qui changent. In order to investigate the meanings of this connection, this chapter examines the established literature in film studies on Deneuve's star persona. The relationship between art and popular cinema in Deneuve's output can also be expressed in terms of the distinction between 'star' and acteur fétiche. Aspects of the pre-existing Deneuve persona (autonomous, empowered) happily encounter Téchiné's narratives of change, transformation, plurality, and becoming. Finally, and to take a distance from questions of stardom and acting technique, it is possible to see in the supremely cinematic Deneuve face one of the best examples of what Deleuze and Guattari call visagéité, or facialisation.

This chapter attempts to define three of the central components of the intuitionist-realist tradition: tradition's conceptualisation of the ‘problem’ of modernity; the proposed ‘solution’ to that problem; and the elaboration of an aesthetic vehicle through which such a solution can be realised. It explores the intuitionist realism in the work of Grierson, Bazin and Kracauer, in relation to the ‘problem of modernity’ and ‘totality’. All of them insisted that realist films should place the portrayal of social reality over formal or overly rhetorical experimentation. Grierson's primary concern was for ‘modern industrial society’, whereas Kracauer argues that the way to escape from ‘spiritual nakedness’ is through transcending the abstract relation to one's own experience of the world. The model of cinematic realism developed by Bazin can be differentiated from the Kracauer model in the sense that Bazin was more antipathetic to modernist or formalist art than Kracauer.

As he had done after La Lune dans le caniveau, Jean-Jacques Beineix had gone on a three-month cruise in his yacht after the release of 37°2 le matin, visiting Stromboli before going on to the Peleponnese islands. Given the polemics to which Beineix's previous films had given rise, reviewers' reactions to Roselyne et les lions were in the main surprisingly positive, if somewhat muted. The general feeling was that the film was slow and simple, and the finale excessive. Reviewers, indeed, and even more so interviewers, made much of the apparent parallels between Roselyne et les lions and Luc Besson's Le Grand Bleu, seeing these films, along with Annaud's L'Ours, as part of a trend: films which focused on animals as much, if not more, in the case of Annaud's film, than humans.

This chapter discusses the inception and production of the film Britannia Hospital (1982). The initial inspiration for the film came from a Daily Mirror article, which narrates hospital workers protesting against admission of private patients to Charing Cross Hospital. The chapter discusses the collaboration of David Sherwin and Lindsay Anderson in the writing and research for this film, the expenditure and income of the film and the responses of friends and fans.

This chapter constitutes a set of serial negotiations between shared contexts (discourses of auteurism, gender, genre and the political) and focuses on the individual specificities of the respective oeuvres of Dominique Cabrera, Noémie Lvovsky, Laetitia Masson and Marion Vernoux. The auteurist approach, which has long enjoyed a privileged position in Film Studies generally, and in the history of French cinema in particular, asserts the director, as auteur, as the 'unifying principle in the production, interpretation and reception of an artwork'. The evocation of patterns based on repetition, recognition and innovation immediately recalls the function of cinematic genre and its central role in configurations both of the auteur and of gendered cultural production and reception. The conventional distinction between auteur and genre-led production is embedded in the projected opposition between popular cinema and auteur cinema.

An overview of the Cato Street Conspiracy and why it should be taken seriously by historians of Britain and Ireland.

This chapter focuses on Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Greenes Memoriall’, a sonnet sequence that forms part of his pamphlet Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets (1592). Harvey’s pamphlet, a response to Robert Greene’s slandering him and his brothers, is commonly regarded as vengeful, but the sonnets in the volume display a conscious effort on Harvey’s part to conquer his anger. The chapter argues that Harvey intends to show his journey from initial anger towards greater emotional detachment and a balance of temper. His surprising choice to express himself through sonnets (a format he was not very familiar with and perhaps not very good at) may be explained as a strategy within his struggle to regain his temper: the trope of sonnet as a form that exemplifies the ‘sweetness’ of poetry serves to illustrate the idea of restoring a healthy balance of temper, because the sonnet serves to neutralise the ‘bitter gall’ of his anger. Thus Harvey was effectively self-medicating through poetry, and grappling with the constraints of metre and rhyme in an unfamiliar poetic form forced him to detach himself from his anger and to consider more carefully how to express his points than he might have done in prose.

Le Gai Savoir marks, within Jean-Luc Godard's œuvre, the mythic return to zero that had been repeatedly called for over the preceding two years. If this is the case, it is doubtless largely because the film is articulated around the rupture represented by the student revolt and accompanying strikes and demonstrations associated with May 1968. Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's collaborative approach is bound up with a certain rejection of auteurism on Godard's part, which he considered to be incompatible with radical socialist politics. Pravda, filmed in Czechoslovakia by Godard and Gorin with a Czech documentary team, but edited by Godard alone, is perhaps exemplary in this regard. Tout va bien, co-directed with Jean-Pierre Gorin, was Godard's first broadly commercial film since he turned his back on the mainstream film industry in 1968. The scene is filmed in one long tracking shot behind the checkouts at this enormous supermarket.

This chapter explores the literary genealogy of the notion of post-1945 England sketched out in Donald Davie's essay, with its assumptions about agriculture and industry, and about sub-urbanisation and national decline. It looks at Philip Larkin's position as national poet than David Gervais does in his Literary Englands. Early in his career Larkin had been a novelist of great promise as well as a poet, and his 'England' is something that is also defined in his novels. Thomas Hardy is as responsible as any writer for the tone of elegy for a predominantly rural nation that is so prominent in early twentieth-century accounts of Englishness. His portrayal of the conflict between tradition and modernisation in the countryside was taken up by the rural historian and sociologist George Sturt in books as Change in the Village. The chapter discusses the poet-novelist Edward Thomas before returning to E.M. Forster and Howards End.

Each one of Takeshi Kitano's sixty-nine images contains a narrative and each of the thirty mini-narratives composed by him and by other filmmakers using the archive of sixty-nine images begins with an image, not a narrative or a script. The images do not illustrate a written text, nor do they follow any prearranged, pre-existing pattern. The 'classical' film belonged to a system of legibility. Kitano's game, and his films, proceed from different assumptions. Bazin and the Nouvelle Vague directors and critics who were inspired by him, like Godard, helped to give birth to a new cinema and one that Kitano has inherited. It is perfectly fitting that Kitano was honoured by Cahiers du cinéma and that he invited Cahiers to play a game that was already theirs.

Almost thirty years before the release of The French Lieutenant's Woman, Karel Reisz published an essay 'Substance into Shadow', in which he called for a creative dialogue between novel and film in an attempt to formulate a workable cinematic strategy that would allow the filmmaker to push the parameters of his art without undermining the essence and narrative content of his literary source. The film circumscribes the issue of existentialism as another form of self-delusion. Instead of tracing the evolution, in the Darwinian sense, of a man who discovers a nascent existentialism ahead of his time, the film is essentially a double love story, the sentimental education of a decent Victorian chap. In the film, acting combines with montage to deconstruct authentic identity, while at the same time returning it to the protean, transformative power of art.